


Her Dark Shining Among the Stars

by callmelyss



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bounty Hunters, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Gray Jedi Rey, Moral Ambiguity, Oral Sex, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 00:44:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16733778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmelyss/pseuds/callmelyss
Summary: She doesn’t trust the girl, exactly, because she’s never really trusted anyone. She trusts self-interest; she trusts greed and avarice. She trusts motivations she can understand. It’s been weeks since the destruction of theSupremacy, and she still doesn’t quite understand why the girl pulled her from the void instead of leaving her there, but she believes she must have had some purpose. The girl is not an altruist by her estimation; she is a survivor. She fled the desert and grueling, unending servitude and flung herself into the stars, hoping, not for something better, maybe, but for somethingelse. She has no use for dead weight, for charity.—Everything crumbles, and Phasma finds her way out again—with help.





	Her Dark Shining Among the Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Asher_Ephraim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asher_Ephraim/gifts).



> Hi, Asher! I was so intrigued by the possibility of this pairing.
> 
> Regarding the canon divergence, it applies almost entirely to Rey and happens pre-TFA. I was trying to imagine some other circumstances in which she'd be a Dark or Gray Force-user, depending on your interpretation. Her overall backstory is much the same, however, in terms of her upbringing, abandonment, etc.
> 
> Phasma's story picks up after TLJ.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

She drifted among the wreckage. She didn’t know for how long. 

Before that, there was fire, blooming red and orange, and the smoky fat-crackle of roasting flesh and the tang of hot metal and the world cracked in two, and she was falling, falling far. 

After: the slow spin through space among the debris. The cold, beyond cold, sliced into her armor. Her exposed eye swelled and strained and burst and then saw nothing more. Her lungs ached, seeking, struggling. At one point, she must have passed within the remains of a containment field, and there she stayed, caught up under a twisted piece of durasteel like so much detritus herself, taking great shuddering inhales, not knowing how long the air would last, but seizing every additional moment, neither relenting nor surrendering.

It would be her tomb, she understood when no rescue came, when she saw the distant flashes, the surviving destroyers jumping away into hyperspace, the sapphirine streaks of ion trails left in their wakes. And it was a fitting end, perhaps, floating among the shattered remains of all she had helped build, had shaped. She would never have chosen to die for it, had betrayed gladly enough it to achieve her own ends, to save her own skin. In a way, it felt like revenge, that they left her there to die, forgotten. She didn't blame them.

The lights blinded her when they came, a pair of them like two glowing, amber eyes, nearer than the stars. Behind them, she could just make out the shadow of a ship, small and brown and boxy, with two long arms ending in pincers that pulled the metal apart, grasping and dismantling. The craft, which seemed to be staring at her—crumpled as she was against the hull—was not a First Order ship. Had no sleek Imperial lines, lacked Armitage’s fetish for everything that had been. The scavengers were already descending.

 _Let it alone_ , she wanted to say. _This wreck is mine_.

No, she reflected as her consciousness lapsed again, maybe for the last time, it was more like something she would have seen on her homeworld, on Parnassos. Rusty and ungainly and piecemeal. 

It reached for her.

 

* * *

 

The girl is tinkering because the girl is always tinkering, always fussing with some bit of wiring or welding two pieces of rubbish together or scouring black, oily gunk from the guts of some rescued piece of machinery. She never throws anything away, the girl. Never wastes food or water or scraps of cloth, everything she has or finds purposed and repurposed until it disintegrates. The lunar compound and ship she calls home are full of baubles and gadgets, waiting to be made whole again, to be woven into another gadget or weapon. Phasma doesn’t need to know where she comes from to understand the sort of place it is—scraping, desolate, lean. She comes from such a place herself.

“Got us a job,” is all she says when Phasma comes into the front room, tacky-eyed with sleep.

“What kind of job?” They do all kinds: no one can afford to be picky in this life. She and the girl, of course, possess a useful combination of skills between them.

“Your kind,” the girl says, handing her a battered datapad. 

Which is to saying:  _killing_.

She’s had to relearn to do almost everything with one eye, the ruined pit hidden by a black patch, but reading has been especially difficult. She hands the pad back without looking at the bounty. “I’m sure it’s a good one,” she says.

She doesn’t trust the girl, exactly, because she’s never really trusted anyone. She trusts self-interest; she trusts greed and avarice. She trusts motivations she can understand. It’s been weeks since the destruction of the _Supremacy_ , and she still doesn’t quite understand why the girl pulled her from the void instead of leaving her there, but she believes she must have had some purpose. The girl is not an altruist, by her estimation; she is a survivor. She fled the desert and grueling, unending servitude and flung herself into the stars, hoping, not for something better, maybe, but for something _else_. She has no use for dead weight, for charity. No one does, except pampered children and self-important bureaucrats.

“I’ll lay in a course then,” the girl says. She uses the same Core World intonation that Phasma does, that nearly everyone in the Order did, no matter how distant their origins from the galaxy’s shining center. Not that it means anything out here, not that it ever did, except that the Republic and the Empire and the New Republic stretched far and wide, leaving their traces across countless worlds and systems, tacky and lingering and impossible to scrub clean.

“Where is it?” she thinks to ask as an afterthought, although it’s irrelevant. They’re going; she’ll go, put a blaster bolt in some poor, dumb sod’s head without hesitation. Stars know they need the credits. And she's getting bored.

“Nowhere. Where else?”

 

* * *

 

After she brought her in from the cold, aimless dark, the girl peeled off her armor, piece by piece, stacked it by her bunk and tended to Phasma’s injuries. Her eye was beyond saving, but she dabbed bacta on her burns and wrapped her in a plasti-foil blanket and gave her fluids. She did so without coddling her, without gentle murmurs or hushed inquiries about her wellbeing or warnings that _this might sting some_  or any other mothering. She’s learned since then that the girl’s never had much mothering herself, doesn’t know what it should sound like, but Phasma prefers that, without all the clucking and fussing even medical droids seem prone to these days.

What had moved her considerably more, although she hasn’t said as much: how the girl repaired her armor for her, careful, precise, replacing the unsalvageable pieces with and mending the helmet with plasteel and chrome. She looks more patchwork than she once did, black among the gleaming silver, and her cape hangs ragged behind her, the red frayed and singed, but she’s still imposing with a blaster in her hand. Her aim has steadily improved, too; when they rest on the dustball moon the girl calls home, she practices behind the compound, shooting targets assembled from rusty garbage.

Not that it’s mattered. These Outer Rim marks are all filthy and whinging and desperate; they’re not hardened criminals so much as they’ve run afoul of the wrong people. Phasma doesn’t pity them, not at all, but she is wearied by them, disappointed, even. None of them have resembled anything like a challenge.

She’s almost delighted, then, when today’s mark shoots back, catching her shoulder plate and flinging her backward into the dirt of this no-name planet out on the edge of uncharted space. The impact bruises, kicks the air from her lungs, but she’s glad of the reminder. She’s alive and she has a pfassking job to do. She can’t afford complacency any more than she ever could; she’s Phasma, for kriff’s sake. Feeling renewed by the blow, she sits up to shoot the mark again. Is both amused and exasperated to find him kicking in midair, clutching uselessly at his skinny neck, his eyes and veins bulging purple. The girl is scowling at him; her fist clenches and she releases a small scream and something crackles, bones contracting and snapping like cartilage. 

His body falls in a ruined heap at her feet.

“I had it,” Phasma chastises her.

“He _shot_ you,” the girl snarls, baring her teeth. She stoops to search the body, callous, efficient, for his ident chip and, finding it, pockets it, along with a handful of credits and whatever bit of shine he had on his person. She doesn’t waste anything, the girl.

 _I didn’t know you cared_ , Phasma doesn’t bother to say.

 

* * *

 

The revelation of her new companion's abilities hadn’t surprised her; she casually observed them a week in when the girl used them to shift the hull of an old freighter which they towed in for salvage. Indeed, it’s been an age since anything surprised her, certainly since Brendol Hux fell out of the jaundiced clouds and onto her planet and unknowingly gave her a hand out of the pit and into the glittering sky. FN-2187 had come close in his way, but cowardice never shocked her, betrayal less so. She had had high hopes for him, of course, but that didn’t mean anything. There would have been more proteges after the traitor, at least if there had been time, if the Order hadn’t split in half under her feet.

She doesn’t regret it.

 _How long have you been able to do that?_ she asked the girl over reconstituted bread and home-grown vegetables. She keeps a garden patch and showed Phasma how to tend it, careful irrigation and weeding. 

 _Since I was small._ She frowned, remembering, maybe, that discovery, that she could read minds and lift hunks of metal ten times her size. _An old man offered to teach me something about it once, but I—wasn’t what he wanted_. 

 _In what way?_ She knew only a little from what she had observed of Ren, although it was mostly the scope of his powers that interested her, breaking necks and blocking blaster shots, not the convoluted philosophy behind them. They were _useful_ , much as Armitage liked to rail against them.

The girl raised her eyebrows at the second question before answering. Their conversations tended towards the monosyllabic most of the time; she was as unaccustomed to talking as Phasma was, perhaps more so, having been on her own for so long. When she did chatter, it was incomprehensible technobabble, the sort she thought she’d left behind on the star destroyers. 

 _He thought I was too close to the Dark._ She shrugged when she did respond. _Compromised_.  _He'd seen it before, he said. Couldn't risk it again._

Ren had been like that, afraid of contamination, of division, had spent far too much of his time bleating about it, about the Light and the Dark, by her estimation. When in the end, there was only power. Survival. The weak and the strong. _What an idiot_ , she remarked.

 

* * *

 

The girl is trembling above Phasma, thighs quaking on either side of her face as she straddles her. She braces her hands against the compound wall as she keens softly. Phasma licks into her, not sparing her, feeling the push and glide of muscle against her tongue. She rubs the girl’s clit with her thumb, drawing steady circles clockwise and counterclockwise around and against the pink nub, teasing pressure, withdrawing, pressing hard. Phasma’s face is wet with her own saliva and the girl’s fluids, sharp-tasting, saline. She’s wrung one orgasm from her already, can feel her exhaustion in the shivering of her legs. She kneads the swell of her ass with her free hand, coaxing her. The girl spasms around her tongue again with a cry.

This she did not need to relearn how to do one-eyed. She found the girl in her bunk, thighs splayed and taut, head thrown back, eyes pinched shut, rubbing herself frantically a few weeks in, and finally had occasion to say, _I can help you with that._  It's been this since then, although she reminds her, from time to time, that it isn't required. Phasma doesn't have to, doesn't owe her this.

The girl isn't an altruist or an ascetic, however, so she does take what's offered. 

Afterward, she settles against Phasma, biting her neck and collarbone tiredly and leaving rosy blotches, mouthing over her breasts and sucking at both nipples until they’re slick and peaked. Phasma’s skin fascinates her, paler and more delicate than her own tan callouses. For her part, Phasma does not ask for these things, does not ask to be touched, as she’s asked for nothing since the girl brought her in from the wreck; that is more debt than she would willingly incur already. Still, she rocks against the girl’s talented fingers, taking them deeper, accepts her kisses when offered. She’s never especially cared about kissing, rarely bothered romancing the underlings who found their way to her bed in the Order or the raw whelps she knew on Parnassos years ago, but the girl, _this_ girl, _Rey_ , does it as she does everything, rough and slightly feral and demanding, and Phasma—Phasma finds she likes that.

Afterward, the girl discovers the swelling, darkening to a bruise, where the blaster shot caught her earlier and traces it, frowning. “You should have better armor.”

“My armor is perfectly adequate,” she responds. 

The girl nips her lip in remonstrance. She does not like to be contradicted or denied; she likes to make everything work as well as it can, to eke out the highest degree of efficiency, to make things _work_. She cannot help but tinker, but try to fix what she finds out here in the nowhere and nothing. Phasma understands this about her now. There’s nothing nurturing in it, nothing beneficent, not really, not in this or her rescue. It’s more scraping, scrabbling in the sand for the smallest bit of something she can call her own, whatever she finds and fixes—they’re hers.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! <3


End file.
